Blending mobile and ambient technologies to support mobility in practice based education: the case of teacher education

Practice based education is gaining a growing popularity in fields as diverse as, e.g. software engineering, pedagogy, and medical studies. Practice based education involves mobility of students since the learning takes place in different arenas. In this paper we focus on a practice-based pedagogy course we are cooperating with. In this case, students are moving around the university, where theoretical lectures take place, and the schools where they do their practice. In this context we introduced a mobile blog to support informal cooperation among students and teachers. Mobile devices were expected to support the students in collecting and publishing fragments of their experiences to be used for reflection and shared with other students. However, our experience with the initial introduction of the mobile blog shows that students’ mobility dramatically limits the visibility of the system. In this paper we propose the usage of shared ambient displays to enrich the spaces that are inhabited by the students to assure a better visibility of the system. Access to the system when students are mobile could be achieved by mobile technologies, e.g. via mobile phones. However, shared displays can promote a higher degree of visibility because they support “chance encounters” with the system. In addition, the system is in this way contextualized in the community life and the information is made visible in a context where it can be used to foster informal cooperation among students. The work reported is part of the MOTUS2 project (http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~divitini/motus2).